Don paused, took a sip of scotch. “In my twenty-five years on the force, and thirteen years in Homicide, I’ve never seen a case mishandled as badly as this one.”
“Much better. Why? Expand on what you read, and how you would do it differently.”
“Let’s start with the interviews. Not only were they conducted incorrectly, but possibly fraudulently. If you compare the list of people interviewed to the hotel’s registered guests,you’ll see right away many guests were never interviewed at all. So people who were present at the hotel the night Julian Crist died were never asked basic questions about what they saw or what they heard, or about their own whereabouts that night. Out of one hundred eighty-eight guests, only one hundred four were interviewed. What happened to the other eighty-four?
“Plus, the staff at the hotel were interviewed in groups. This is gross mismanagement. All potential witnesses and suspects should be interviewed separately. This is done for many reasons, but the most common is to confirm individual accounts of the night in question corroborate with each other. Interviewing witnesses and suspects individually also helps create a timeline of events. Many members of the staff were interviewed in groups of two and three, which allows their stories to change based on what each interviewee is hearing during the course of questioning. Gross, gross incompetence.”
“Have you read through the interview of a guest named Ellie Reiser?”
“No, I have not. To the best of my knowledge, this person was never interviewed by the St. Lucian investigators.”
“Ellie states, in letters to me and in a recent interview, that policedidquestion her on the day Julian’s body was discovered.”
“If so,” Detective Markus said, “there’s no record of it.”
“Ellie claims she was in Grace Sebold’s room the night Julian Crist was killed. She says her testimony was not allowed at Grace’s trial because she was intoxicated during the day and her accounts of the evening could not be relied upon to be accurate.”
“I don’t know if she was drunk or not,” Markus said. “But if she provided a clear alibi, and if this had happened inthe States, the judge would have allowed her to testify and allowed the defense to cross-examine her. Then a jury would decide if she was a reliable witness. However, with her interview never being formally logged by the investigators, it disappeared from existence. This shows me that the detectives were looking for information that matched their suspicions, not allowing the information they found to lead them to their suspicions. A very backward way of running an investigation. From what I read, they decided early on that Grace Sebold was guilty, and then set out to prove it. Tried to make everything fit that narrative.”
Sidney referred to her notes.
“A shoeprint was found near the bluff where Julian fell to his death. Forensics matched the print to a shoe found in Grace Sebold’s room. Soil analysis shows that the shoe held dirt that came from this location. How accurate is the forensics, in your opinion?”
“Very. It means Grace Sebold, or someone wearing that shoe, was on the bluff at some point in time. What I find interesting is that there were six other prints found at the bluff, but investigators never bothered to look into them or find out who they belonged to. And it was documented that the day before Julian Crist was killed, the entire wedding party had hiked together to the summit of Gros Piton. So there you go. The shoeprint could have been created during that hike andnotwhen Grace Sebold supposedly went back to the bluff to commit a murder. What’s worse is that the detectives sequestered twelve pairs of shoes from hotel guests. Photographed the tread and ran ID analysis on them to come up with the make and manufacturer. But once they got a hit on Grace Sebold’s shoe, they stopped there. They didn’t bother to see if any of the other prints on the bluff matched the shoes they collected. This is calledselectivelyinvestigating.They didn’t want it formally recorded that any other matches were discovered on the bluff, because the defense would have used it at trial.”
Sidney referred to her notes again and took a sip of tequila.
“Julian’s blood was found in Grace Sebold’s cottage at Sugar Beach,” she said. “As was bleach. The suggestion was that the bleach was used to clean away the blood. How accurate again is the method by which this evidence was collected.”
“Very,” he said again. “Basic swab testing after luminol application. Squirt the luminol, turn on the black light. Bleach and blood, invisible to the naked eye, glow blue. The DNA results of the blood discovered matched to Julian Crist. It’s accurate.”
Detective Markus looked over at Derrick.
“Turn that off a minute.”
Derrick took the camera off his shoulder.
“Listen,” Markus said to Sidney. “I think they targeted her. I think they convicted her early on in the investigation and too narrowly focused their energy on proving that she did it. They conducted too few interviews, and did them in an ass-backward manner that would never fly in the States, and they disregarded evidence that didn’t match their theory. The consensus, when I asked around about this case, was that a murder on a small island is bad for business. Especially if a local islander murdered a U.S. tourist. An American killing an American?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Not so much of a problem, and won’t have an effect on tourism, as long as the case is closed quickly.”
“Even if there were clearly things that pointed to Grace’s innocence?”
Markus took another sip of scotch. “You know whatprosecutors say around here? Any D.A. can convict a guilty man, but it takes a special D.A. to convict an innocent one.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I’m not suggesting that was the mindset down there. But either way, Sid, there’re some things about this case that can’t be ignored. His blood in her room is one of them. Her prints on the boat oar that was used to kill him is another. That her best friend claims she was with Grace Sebold the night Julian Crist was killed is one piece to consider. But I’m sorry, Sid, the forensics trump someone’s drunken recollection.” He drained his scotch. “This friend, is she reliable?”
“She’s a doctor,” Sidney said without conviction.
“Plenty of doctors are liars. Do you trust her?”
Sidney thought back to her interview with Ellie Reiser. “I’ve got no reason not to.”
“What’s the timing? When did Grace’s friend come to her room? Was it late at night, after the murder could have happened? After Grace could have cleaned the room?”
Sidney took a deep breath and shook her head. “I’m not sure. She stayed overnight, but I don’t know what time she arrived. I’ll have to pin down the timeline.”
Her cell phone rang. “Sorry.” She looked at the caller ID and saw a Raleigh, North Carolina, number. “Hold on a minute.” She held the phone to her ear. “Sidney Ryan.”
